I set down my utensil. The moment had arrived, and I had been constructing the approach for three days, turning the variables over with the same rigor I applied to tactical planning. She deserved the truth. She had been asking for it since the Processing Room, and every deflection I offered eroded a foundation I needed to build.
Because I needed her. Not in the way the bond demanded, not in the biological imperative that made my scales flare, and my claws extend. I needed her mind. Her competence. Her ability to see a broken system and reroute it.
“What I am about to tell you does not leave this room.” I held her gaze. I felt the scales along my forearms shift, and I let them. A display of unguarded emotion I would have suppressed in any other context. “If this information reaches Dr.Corsine, people will die. One of them will be my sister.”
The flicker vanished. Her eyes sharpened, and she set down her utensil with the deliberate care of someone who understood that the conversation had changed.
“Tell me.”
I told her.
I started with the scanner. The ancient technology embedded in the station’s walls predated the prison conversion by thousands of years. “Corsine isolated a synthetic compound from it,” I said. “An airborne catalyst that activates latent bonding genetics in individuals the scanner flags as compatible. She deploys it during intake processing.”
Kira’s fingers spread flat against the desk. “She is triggering bonds. Artificially.”
“She is manufacturing inventory.” The word tasted like ash. “Bonded pairs, sold to buyers across the galaxy. Wealthy collectors. Military contractors. Criminal organizations that want warriors whose combat performance is amplified three hundred percent by the mate-link.”
I paused. She needed to understand the mechanism she was living inside.
“The bond progresses in four phases. Phase One is the Spark. The initial recognition event. What you felt in the ProcessingRoom, and what I felt in the common area. Phase Two is the Tether. Proximity dependence. The migraines, the distance pain, the symptoms that brought you to the floor in the corridor. Phase Three is the Grounding. Physical intimacy that stabilizes the bond and opens an emotional channel between the pair. Phase Four is the Link. A permanent claiming. Full emotional and locational transparency between mates. It cannot be reversed.”
“And we’re in Phase Two.”
“We are in Phase Two. The Tether. The symptoms will continue to escalate until Phase Three occurs or until the bond destabilizes, which carries its own risks.”
Her palms pressed flat against the desk. The same grounding gesture I had observed on the intake feeds her first night, palms to thighs, four counts in, four counts out. “How many?”
“Forty-seven pairs in three years. Held in cells hidden behind her legitimate research front, then transported through the Forgotten Corridors to a docking bay the station’s official schematics do not show.” I held her gaze. “Logged in the records as ‘transferred’ or ‘released.’ Never seen again.”
“And the courts that sent me here?”
“Sell labor sentences to a Consortium shell corporation and audit nothing. Your tribunal fed you into this machine legally, Kira. The law was its front door.”
She absorbed that with a stillness that had weight. “And you’ve let this happen.” Her voice was level. Not accusatory. Diagnostic.
“I have not let it happen. I have been unable to prevent it.”
“There’s a difference?”
“The difference is my sister.” I leaned forward. The desk was wide enough that this did not bring us close, but the shift in my posture was enough to change the geometry of theconversation. “Sera. She is twenty-two years old. She is being held in a Consortium facility at a location I have not been able to identify. She is one of the last unbonded Zethrani females, which makes her genetically valuable to the people who fund Corsine’s research.”
I paused. The words that followed had lived in my chest for three years, compressed under the weight of discipline and duty and the grinding calculus of survival. Speaking them aloud was an act of exposure I had not performed for any living being.
“The Consortium wants to study Zethrani bonding genetics. To weaponize them, the way Corsine has weaponized the ancient scanner. Sera is leverage. If I expose the trafficking ring, if I disobey, if I fail to maintain operational order on this station, Corsine transmits a single message. And my sister is sold to the highest bidder or used as a breeding subject for their experiments.”
Silence. The ventilation system cycled through the room, the clean air current Kira had restored, moving between us.
“How old was she when they took her?” Kira’s voice had changed. The diagnostic distance was gone, replaced by something rawer, and I watched her palms press harder against the desk.
“Nineteen.”
“Three years ago.”
“Yes.”
She was quiet. Her eyes moved across my face, reading me the way she read a schematic. Her assessment had weight, and thoroughness, and I held still under it because I had given her the truth, and the truth demanded stillness.
“Corsine triggered our bond,” she said. Not a question. The connection she had been circling for days finally landed.
